


thread by thread

by rarelypoetic



Series: stream of consciousness [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, M/M, POV Dean Winchester, Post-Episode: s13e03 Patience, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 04:54:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12574164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarelypoetic/pseuds/rarelypoetic
Summary: a brief window into Dean's head as he (ineffectually) deals with the loss of Cas.(unnecessary to read the other parts in this series first or at all, I promise)





	thread by thread

You lost him. And it’s not that it stings, it’s that every breath you take in his absence is corrosive. It’s that you keep waking up with the memory of his hand warm against your shoulder. It’s that sometimes when you deplete a fifth of whiskey in the space of an hour, you can seem him for a moment, a wavering phantom in your bedroom doorway. But only then, and only for a moment. 

Loss is not your friend, but it is your constant companion. An unwelcome spectre always floating listlessly in your periphery. But loss, as you’ve learned, is only contingent on getting attached to people. After him, you can’t afford to make that mistake again. And so distance becomes your second companion.

The Boy looks at you differently these days. There’s still a wounded veil (and how _dare_ he think he’s hurting? How _dare_ he thinks he knows anything about loss?) over his features, but beneath that there’s something else now. He pities you. It might have been something Sam said, or it might have been that the kid had finally grown up enough to realize that your approval meant nothing. You are a shattered vessel, a record too wrecked to play anything but the same two stretches of static. 

Sometime after coming back from that hunt with Jody the Boy started acting less careful around you and more like he had something to prove. But he doesn’t get it, still; you don’t want him to prove anything. You don’t care if Sam is right in the long run, and the Boy is the secret salvation the entire world has been waiting for. You don’t care if he destroys Lucifer and shuts down all of Hell in the process. 

You don’t care if he makes it so that another demon or angel never walks the earth again. 

There is only one thing you let yourself care about, and that thing is so much of an impossibility that it doesn’t bear thinking about. 

It’s not that you lost him. It’s that there’s nothing left. Wherever he went, he took with him everything that you are. You go through the motions every day because you know if you kill yourself you won’t end up where he is. Because he is in a place that does not exist. Because he is unreachable to even the most powerful being in the known universe. Because he is nowhere. 

You’ve been suicidal before. You’ve wanted to hurt yourself, hit yourself, break yourself, drown yourself. You’ve craved every manner of self-destruction. But you’ve never wanted this. It takes you a while to parse the feeling, but when you finally do it’s with underwhelming resignation. 

You do not want to exist. You want to erase yourself the same way he has been erased. You don’t care about the things that you did in your life, the people you saved that led you to this point. You want to wipe every trace of yourself from the face of this world, make Heaven and Hell forget your name.

You told the Boy you would be the one to kill him, but the truth is that you don’t have it in you to care about the fate of the world anymore. The truth is that every day you are one step closer to getting down on your knees and begging him: _Unmake me. If you can’t bring him back, unravel me thread by thread until I can’t be reformed, until God himself could not hope to piece me back together. Please. I’m already halfway there._

Instead, you watch him pity you. You watch Sam grieve. And you watch what’s left of yourself in the mirror, sometimes, when you can stand to look at your own reflection. But when you do, you see only shadows.

**Author's Note:**

> :/


End file.
